Make sure you start the Processing application with Administrator priviliges (on WIndows 7, this means right-click->Run as administrator)

Try starting the AVD manager yourself (from something like C:\Program Files (x86)\Android\android-sdk-windows\AVD Manager.exe), again with Admin privileges, and start the Processing-xxxx Virtual Device. Once you have that up and running (ie, the emulator shows a proper phone launcher screen), do Run in Emulator in the Processing sketch (in fact, probably best to just do it from an empty sketch). Does that still fail?

First of all let me make clear I’m running Processing 2.0a4 on a Windows 7 32bit machine.

Launching AVD manager, selecting and starting a virtual device (from within AVD manager), waiting for it to initialize, keeping it running and only then trying to run the sketch DID WORK on my machine.

Furthermore, it didn’t make any difference, whether I launched AVD manager from command line or from within Processing, or whether I ran it as Administrator or not. In both cases it worked. The critical point to note is … “Wait for the virtual device to completely initialize before running the sketch”.

It might be a workaround, not a real solution to the problem, but it does allow me to test run my sketches. Thanks a lot. You saved me a lot of time and frustration.

Great, glad things worked out. There are a lot of moving parts here, so sometimes the only solution is to tweak it until it works.